"(Liverpool, 1940 - New York, 1980) British singer and musician, founder and leader of The Beatles, the legendary Liverpool quartet that dominated the music scene in the 1960s. During his time with The Beatles, John Lennon contributed to the band his creative concerns and his radical nonconformity, in front of the more commercial and frivolous vein of Paul McCartney, with whom he shared the leading role in the composition of the songs. After the dissolution of the group in 1970, he embarked on a new musical stage with results as memorable as the album Imagine (1971). After a five-year retirement, in 1980 he was assassinated by a deranged shortly after presenting his latest work, Double Fantasy .
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940, while Nazi planes were bombing the city. His father, named Alfred, was a sailor who visited the home little, until he completely disappeared. Then it was his mother, Julia Stanley, who disappeared, leaving the child in the care of a sister of hers named Mary. It was she who taught John the first chords on an old banjo from his grandfather's.
Liverpool was then a port city in full decline. With a heterogeneous population, life there did not bring great joys. However, the constant hustle and bustle caused by maritime traffic also had its advantages: abundant country and rhythm and blues records arrived in the luggage of the sailors from across the ocean , which were immediately incorporated into the Liverpoolians' innate fondness for music.
John grew up listening to records by Little Richard, Chuck Berry , Ray Charles and Buddy Holly, illustrious representatives of the musical currents of that time. For a few years he studied at the School of Fine Arts and when he was fifteen he resolved his doubts between painting and music in favor of the latter. In 1956 he met a boy who, like him, only felt fully fulfilled with a guitar in his hands: Paul McCartney . With Paul he formed his first amateur group, The Quarrymen, beginning a period of accelerated learning of the rhythms of rock and roll .
John and Paul wrote their own songs as if it were entertainment. Two years later George Harrison joined them and they dared to perform in some small venues. They were successively named Johnny and the Moondogs and The Nurk Twins. Times were tough: John's mother was killed in 1958 by a frank drunk police officer on duty, and the boy's meager money was completely gone. Throughout 1959, John unsuccessfully looked for work and lived like another unemployed person. But his vitality, his youth and his love for music made him not lose hope.
The Beatles
In the early 1960s the group was reborn as Long John and the Silver Beatles, a long-winded name that was shortened to The Silver Beatles before staying with The Beatles. The term came from a play on words invented by Lennon himself: Buddy Holly's backing group was called The Crickets (grasshoppers) and John was inspired by them to mix the musical term beat , characteristic of an entire generation, and the word beetles (beetles).
John, Paul and George, along with some professional musicians, began a tour of Scotland as companions for Johnny Gentle, a second-rate singer. They also put musical background to the movements of a striptease dancer and agreed to travel to Germany to play in various venues in Hamburg's Chinatown. Anything was better than looking for some boring, low-paying job in Liverpool. Later, back in their hometown, they became the regular group of The Cavern, an underground club where they were able to exhibit the boards acquired during their peculiar tours.
In 1961, a record store owner named Brian Epstein discovered them in that joint. It was a revelation; Although he had no experience in the field, Epstein volunteered as a manager in exchange for 25 percent of the proceeds. From that moment on, The Beatles' career soared to success. With the incorporation as drummer of Ringo Starr in 1962, the group was already complete and prepared to face what was to come: the most insane maelstrom of triumph and glory.
His songs, released by the EMI label, began to dominate the best-seller lists. The Beatles concerts provoked scenes of hysteria among the groupies and the police were unable to contain the screaming youthful mass. "Beatlemania" spread throughout Europe, then the United States and later would reach the rest of the world, including the socialist countries.
The Beatles pieces, composed for the most part by John and Paul, were characterized by melodic and harmonic findings, within what was later called the "Liverpool sound". In addition, the members of the group were distinguished by a new style in clothing and haircut and by a cheerfully defiant attitude, starring especially Lennon: in press conferences and interviews, these boys teased their interlocutors and they manifested as witty, funny and carefree types.
McCartney was the handsome romantic, Harrison the serious and Ringo the funny of the band. As for Lennon, he was a restless rebel and was undoubtedly the most incisive. After being appointed, in 1965, Knights of the Order of the British Empire, John unleashed a scandalous controversy with one of his famous phrases: "The Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ ." Successes, drugs, disputes and reconciliations will follow one another throughout the sixties. And also movies, among others A Hard Day's Night and Help! , both directed by Richard Lester.
Brian Epstein passed away in 1967 from a barbiturate overdose. Lennon married in Gibraltar the following year with the Japanese Yoko Ono , an enigmatic woman whose name means "Daughter of the Ocean". Both events were milestones of an announced separation. Financial problems, artistic jealousy between John and Paul, desire to create without the burden of accommodating the group ... all these elements decreed the dissolution of the group in April 1970. Lennon will pronounce the epitaph of the group and the so-called "prodigious decade" with another concise and expressive phrase: "The dream is over."
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Throughout the 1970s, as the wounds of John and Paul's break with public reconciliation heal, rumors of an upcoming reunion will circulate periodically. Several businessmen will come to offer fabulous sums to congregate them on a stage, but all will be in vain: each one flies on their own, free from the yoke of the Beatles. For Lennon, the seventies were to be one of enormous vitality. On the one hand, he became an activist for pacifism. The photos of his honeymoon in a hotel room in Amsterdam, where he appeared naked with his wife in a gesture of elemental naturalness, went around the world.
With Yoko he had formed the Plastic Ono Band and with it he published a dozen full-length albums. His talent as a composer and lyricist continued to manifest itself in songs such as "Give peace a chance", "Power to the people" or "Some time in New York City". But his undisputed success was Imagine , an intensely personal LP , released in 1971, which contained the song of the same name, the text of which would become a whole pacifist manifesto in that troubled decade.
In 1975, when his battle against the Nixon administration determined to expel him from the United States as an "undesirable foreigner" happily ends and Sean Ono Lennon is born, the marriage's only child, John will disappear completely from circulation and will dedicate himself to family life . For five years, his public appearances were rare and extraordinary. It seemed that not a single note or another word was going to come out of his hitherto restless spirit. But in 1980 the famous cloistered beatle came out of his silence to record with Yoko the album entitled Double Fantasy . In it he proclaimed his eternal love for his wife and son with the simple and catchy refrains of always.
In the fall of that year, when explaining the reasons for his return to studies, Lennon said: "There are people irritated with me because I do not make music. If I had died in 1975, they would only talk about how fantastic it was and things like that. It infuriates them is that I continued living and decided that the most important thing was to do exactly what I wanted to do. In these five years of silence I have learned to rid myself of my intellect, of the image of myself that I have. The songs I make emerge naturally, spontaneously, without consciously thinking about them. In a way, it's like going back to the beginning. I have the feeling that I'm looking at my first album. "
Days later, on December 8, 1980, the murderous bullets of a disturbed worshiper ended his life and turned him, if he was not already, into a god of modernity. Writer Norman Mailer stated: "We have lost a genius of the spirit." As an immediate reaction to his death, Lennon fans posthumously took "Imagine" to number one on the charts. Never have such a number of human beings cried so much when listening to a song."
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